Framing Strategies Stabilize Visual Perception

Article: How Do We Know Where Things Are?
Source: Dartmouth College
Published: June 24, 2021

When we move our eyes to look around a scene, the image of the world projected onto our retina also moves, which in turn changes the image that is sent to the brain. Yet, our brains perceive a stabilized view of the world. Psychologists studying this process, known as "visual stabilization," tested the brain's inherent "steady cam" through two experiments, conducted both in person and online. The first experiment is an example of “paradoxical stabilization,” in this case demonstrating how a stabilized view is produced by a moving frame replicated on a computer monitor. A second experiment demonstrated that participants perceived the location of objects in relation to (moving) frames, even when the objects themselves were stationary. This effect held true across a wide range of frame speeds, sizes, and path lengths tested. In other words, even though the image of what we see "moves" on our retina when our eyes move, (1) the presence of a frame in the scene stabilizes our judgments of location, and (2) our brain has a tendency to perceive objects in relation to available frames. As the senior author of the study states, “Our results show that a framing strategy is at work behind the scenes all the time, which helps stabilize our visual experience.”

My rating of this study: ⭐

Özkan M, Anstis S, Hart BM, et al. "Paradoxical stabilization of relative position in moving frames." PNAS.  18(25):e2102167118. 22 June 2021. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2102167118